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Oil money lubricates Islamic fundamentalism in the UK


jonno 357
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While Her Majesty and Brown’s regime welcomes Kind Abdullah millions of pounds of Saudi oil money are being used to develop Islamic fundamentalism in Britain.

 

A report written this week by Dr Denis MacEoin, an Islamic studies expert at Newcastle who previously taught at the University of Fez. Leading a team of researchers over a two-year project, he uncovered a hoard of malignant literature inside as many as a quarter of Britain’s mosques. All of it had been published and distributed by Saudi authorities.

 

Among the more choice recommendations in leaflets, DVDs and journals were statements that homosexuals should be burnt, stoned or thrown from mountains or tall buildings (and then stoned where they fell just to be on the safe side). Those who changed their religion or committed adultery should experience a similar fate.

 

Almost half of the literature was written in English, suggesting it is targeted at younger British Muslims who do not speak Arabic or Urdu. The material, which was openly available in many of the mosques, including the East London Mosque in Whitechapel, which has been visited by Prince Charles, also encourages British Muslims to segregate themselves from non-Muslims.

 

Cost of propaganda

 

Yahya Birt, son of former BBC boos Sir John Birt and a British convert to Islam estimates “Saudi spending on religious causes abroad as between $2bn [£960m] and $3bn per year since 1975 (comparing favourably with what was the annual Soviet propaganda budget of $1bn), which has been spent on 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres and dozens of Muslim academies and schools“.

 

In addition the Saudis have flooded the Islamic book market with cheap well-produced Wahhabi literature whose print runs, Birt says, “can be five to 10 times that of any other British-based sectarian publication, aggressively targeted for a global English-speaking audience.“ This has had the effect of forcing non-Wahhabi publishers across the Muslim world to close. It has put out of business smaller bookshops catering for a more mainstream Muslim market.

 

The Saudis have also reserved for foreigners 85 per cent of the places at the Islamic University of Medina, which boasts of having more than 5,000 students from 139 countries. Despite the fact that British students gained the reputation in Medina of being unreliable, lazy, and prone to dropping-out, there have so far been hundreds of British graduates who have returned to the UK espousing the rigid Saudi worldview.

 

Salafism comes from a way of looking at Muslim texts which date back to no later than that third generation after Mohamed. It disregards the four main traditions of Islamic law and practice which developed over the centuries since then. Rather like the Protestant reformers in Christianity it speaks of going back to the roots. Abdal Hakim Murad, who lectures in Islamic Studies at Cambridge explains: “Just as the Protestants wanted to get rid of the saints and shrines, the Aristotle and Aquinas of medieval theology, so the salafis declare as ’unbelief’ most of the practices which are normative to Islam in the Indian subcontinent.“ Salafism is known for its scriptural rigidity, intense literalism, deep intolerance and rejection of traditional Muslim scholarship.

 

Young Muslims living in Britain are attracted to Salafism because they are searching for an identity but rejecting the factional ethnic Indian subcontinental politics of their parents, says Mehmood Naqshbandi, the author of the City of London’s guide to Islam for non-Muslims. “They are having an identity crisis.“ They have no patience with the old tribal rivalries of their parents’ generation. They have weak links with the Indian subcontinent.

 

They are unhappy with rural imams imported from Pakistan who do not understand the culture of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and politics that surrounds them. And they have been educated in a system that trains them to challenge and to research on their own.

 

“They are ripe for salafism, which claims to have the most transparent route back to the sources of the Prophet’s time. And salafism’s antagonism to mainstream orthodoxy makes it attractive to youth,“ he adds. They need not bother with the long tradition of Islam. The 7/7 suicide bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were salafis. So was the “shoe bomber“ Richard Reid. From there they provided easy prey to the al-Qa’ida notion that anyone who isn’t a salafi is the enemy.

 

Some extremists have tried to take advantage of this by targeting salafi mosques in an attempt to recruit young Britons for violent jihad. They have adopted similar entryist tactics to those once employed by Militant in the Labour Party. Abu Hamza succeeded at Finsbury Park mosque, but a two-year infiltration plot at Brixton mosque, where the shoe-bomber Richard Reid worshipped, failed because non-violent salafis were alert to the danger.

 

“Violence is not inevitable,“ says Philip Lewis, “but it creates the environment in which it is possible for that to be the next step“. Abdal Hakim Murad agrees. “Salafism increases the likelihood of combustion but doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Wahhabism is Islam’s unstable isotope, it regularly produces detonations around the edges,“ he says. “If you throw into the crucible racism, social exclusion and the other experiences of being a young Muslim in Britain’s inner cities, and then combine that with British foreign policy blunders overseas, and then add that to a theology that divides the world in a Manichean way into good and evil, us and them, then – if you put all that together – you may have a very explosive mixture.“

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